Echoes of lost communities
One day there was a knock on the door and families were forced to leave the only homes they’d ever known. Bethan Thomas speaks to former residents of the communities which were demolished after competition forced their factories to close
SITTING in south Llanelli, the Machynys Peninsula boasts a 7,121-yard golf course, golf club and spectacular coastal views reaching as far as Gower.
Tourists and golf enthusiasts travel from every corner of Wales to play the course or walk along the adjoining Millennium Coastal Path.
But while planting their tees or swinging their clubs, many may not know that they are standing on the memories of a community lost to most, except those who once lived there.
The story of Bwlch y Gwynt and Machynys, two working-class communities and home to dozens of families, can be likened to Llanelli town centre’s struggle to compete with nearby new developments in the Trostre area.
But while today the competition is between shops, in the mid-1900s tinplate works and production factories were vying against each other.
In 1872, a time when Llanelli’s tinplate industry and steelworks were growing, a tinplate works was built in Machynys.
Two others tinplate factories then followed on the peninsula in 1910 and 1912, with most of the tinplate being exported to America. During that period workers’ housing was built and the two distinct communities, Bwlch y Gwynt and Machynys, were born.
Like most communities, they were made up of family homes, watering holes, local shops and farmland.
But more than that was the sense of close-knit community that all past residents recall as their favourite thing about living there.
Now 80 years old, Delfryn Owens was born in Bwlch y Gwynt in 1940 and said spending his childhood in the community was a blessing.
“I lived on Embankment Road for 10 years and it was a dream to be a child there. All the kids would be playing in the streets, we were all very close,” said Mr Owens.
“It was like living in a huge playground because we had two farms – we’d call them top farm and bottom farm. We were near the beach and there was a shooting range we used to call ‘the butts.’ American soldiers used to use ‘the butts’ to practise shooting.
“I’ll never forget my childhood there, we used to have so much fun and we used to see who was guarding the works and try to sneak in during the evenings,” he laughed.
Along with the industrial works, the area also had the Machynys School, Joppa Chapel, bus and train links and the Globe Inn – the industrial workers’ main drinking haunt after a long day at the works.
But while the tafarns were the main meeting point for the workers, the canteen served as a gathering place for the children.
Eira McKibbin, who was born in Machynys during the 1940s, said the community really was something special and she still had clear memories of days she spent there as a young girl.
Recalling days meeting friends in the canteen, she said: “I can almost smell the baking of pastries, pies and pasties, which we could buy cheaply or most of the time have for free, as there were always some left over after each shift.
“It was our meeting place for young lovers and sometimes future husbands.”
Although a rural area and a heartland for the Welsh language, throughout the community Welsh, English and Italian could be heard after many Italians migrated to work in the tinworks after the war.
But while the tinworks united families across the community and children grew up as friends because their fathers worked in the factories together, there was a clear rivalry between the neighbouring Bwlch y Gwynt and Machynys communities.
Mrs McKibbin, whose mother and grandmother were also born in Machynys, said: “You’d always say you were one or the other, there was rivalry and competition between the two.”
Caroline Rees Rogers, another past resident, reiterated that sense of competition: “If I said I lived in Machynys instead of the Bwlch, I would have been told no, you live in the Bwlch. They were very much different places, even though they were right next to each other.”
Families living in the community described it as like living in a bubble, isolated and cut off from the rest of the world.
Residents recalled leaving their doors unlocked and even bathing in a tin bath in the back garden.
In a book recalling her memories of living in the community, Mrs McKibbin said: “The Gower was three thousand miles or a stone’s throw away. It could have been America for all we cared. We were worlds apart from anywhere else.”
By 1951, a huge new tinplate factory was built on the other side of Llanelli in Trostre. The Trostre site was a pioneering project and one of the largest of its kind. The new factories were too big for those in Machynys to compete with and, ultimately, they closed in 1961.
Many of the Machynys workers moved over to the Trostre site, but continued living in the communities until they received a knock on the door during the mid-1960s.
Grief poured over the communities on that day when families were told that, as the works were closed, the 90 houses would be demolished and that they were being forced to leave.
A whole community was destroyed as generations prepared to leave all their memories behind and elderly grandparents were evicted from the only homes they’d ever known, and relocated to other areas in Llanelli such as Morfa and Bynea.
Mrs McKibbin, who now lives in Burry Port, said her mum, who had lived in Machynys her entire life, was devastated after being told she had to leave.
“It was like a grief. There was a knock on the door one day and that was that, everything they’d ever known was going.
“People were brokenhearted. They were losing their friends and that sense of community.
“People helped each other, everybody trusted each other and everybody knew everyone – it was a real community,” she added.
After the majority of residents moved out in the mid to late 1960s, much of the community lay derelict and idle for nearly three years, waiting patiently for the bulldozers to turn up one morning and flatten homes and businesses.
That day came in 1970 when both communities were demolished, leaving little trace that families, street parties and children playing in the streets were ever there.
Today, the only indications that the working-class communities ever existed are the small street and golf course which hold their namesakes and the remains of Machynys Farm’s brick gateway.
Generations left their homes and community. Now there is nothing to go back to.